URLs du Jour

Steve Ditko, a comic-book artist best known for his role in creating
Spider-Man, one of the most successful superhero properties ever,
was found dead on June 29 at his home in Manhattan, the police said
on Friday. He was 90. […]

Mr. Ditko, along with the artist Jack Kirby and the writer and
editor Stan Lee, was a central player in the 1960s cultural
phenomenon known as Marvel Comics, whose characters today are
ubiquitous in films, television shows and merchandise.

Though Mr. Ditko had a hand in the early development of other
signature Marvel characters — especially the sorcerer Dr. Strange —
Spider-Man was his definitive character, and for many fans he was
Spider-Man’s definitive interpreter.

The coolest scenes in the Spider-Man movies are those that
redo Ditko's original comic panels. One of the best examples is
Voxsplained
by Alex Abad-Santos. (You'll want to click for the pics.) Bottom line:

One of the frequent criticisms that comics fans level against Stan Lee’s legacy is that Lee took all of the credit and often left none to spare when it came to work and characters that he co-created with legends like Ditko, including Spider-Man. But this scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming won’t let anyone forget what a genius Steve Ditko was at giving life to the legendary webslinger.

But let's not forget
Mr. A, Ditko's
uncompromising sorta-Objectivist hero, and one of the inspirations
for Alan Moore's Rorschach.

Back to our normal programming.
Proverbs Chapter 11 seems to be stuck in a rut over the past few
days.
Proverbs
11:20 is yet another good people/bad people comparison:

20 The Lord detests those whose hearts are perverse,
but he delights in those whose ways are blameless.

Federal debt now equals 78 percent of gross domestic product, the
highest since we had just finished fighting World War II. The CBO
says that under current policies, it can be expected to "approach
100 percent of GDP by the end of the next decade and 152 percent by
2048. That amount would be the highest in the nation's history by
far."

The Trump administration pretends that its policies will unleash such
rapid economic growth that the treasury will get a flood of new revenue.
Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, bragged the
other day that the deficit "is coming down, and it's coming down
rapidly."

Later, he amended his false claim, saying that he "probably should have said future deficits." But that would also have been false. The CBO projects the deficit will balloon from $804 billion this year to $1.3 trillion in 2022.

Kudlow should know better. Congress—and not a penny can be spent
without Congressional assent—hould know better. And voters should
know better.

Last year I wrote an essay describing the emerging “tough-guy Right” and the
almost-comical tendency of Trumpist conservatives to equate their
man with toughness, their tweets with combat, and their movement
with masculinity. In their minds, Never Trumpers aren’t just wrong,
they’re also wimps. They’re beta males. It’s not uncommon to see
throwaway phrases in essays condemning Never Trumpers like Emerald Robinson’s description of
some conservatives as “low-testosterone” and “dilettantish” or Kurt
Schlichter’s condemnation of so-called fussy fredocon gimps. Or, when
they describe their own writing, they’ll use vivid war imagery — like Jesse Kelly’s recent loving
description of “scalping” his ideological enemies.

I’ve written a lot about our culture’s attacks on masculinity. I’ve discussed a man’s duty to defend the weak and the vulnerable. I’ve even decried the apparent increasing physical weakness of men and boys and argued that men were meant to be strong. Yet not once in the modern fights over masculinity had I thought for a moment to include — as markers of male toughness — the ability to deliver spittle-flecked tirades on cable news, to tweet like a punk, or to circle the wagons around a man who avoided service in his own generation’s war and who compared sexually transmitted diseases to his own personal Vietnam.

I'm probably guilty of, on occasion, writing about progressives
getting their panties in a bunch … or clutching their pearls … or …
maybe something about douches.

The USPS actually has two legally enforced monopolies, as per Title
39 of the US Code. One is over the delivery of anything defined as a
“letter,” which is within certain size and weight limits. The
second is over the use of your mailbox. That is correct: there are
criminal violations if anyone puts anything in your mail box that is
not US government approved “mail.” The US is the only country that I
know having that latter monopoly, while most countries (including
all 27 member EU countries) have done away with the first, the
delivery monopoly.

Yes, when it comes to letter delivery, the US is actually more
socialist than most other countries.

As David notes, President Trump has
ordered
a study for USPS reform, but that seems to have been driven more
by his animus towards Jeff Bezos than his devotion to free market
philosophy.

Ivanka made a single factual comment: "Two million people have come
off food stamps and have come back into the economy."

WaPo: two out of four "Pinocchios". Even though it admits the two
million number is, well, true.

Freeman quotes his predecessor:

Some good work is done under the rubric of “fact checking,” but the
label is deceptive. Calling it “fact checking” is meant to convey an
extra degree of objective authority, but “fact check” journalists do
not limit themselves to questions of verifiable objective fact.
Frequently they accuse politicians of dishonesty because the
journalists favor a different interpretation of facts that are not
in dispute. Sometimes their “rulings” are mere opinions on matters
about which they do not know the facts, or that are not factual
questions at all.

This is why most—ahem—honest people only quote the WaPo fact
checker or the even-more-lefty Politifact when they debunk
some progressive talker. As in, usually, "even the WaPo
couldn't believe this."

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